in luce mors
by Madame Rhea Di'Ey
Summary: Dying burns. It's an welcomed kind of pain, Nuada finds. [Vignette. Light angst.]


**Title: **in luce mors (appox. translation: _in the light of death_)  
**Summary: **Nuada crumbles, and the flames of his death swallow him whole. Only, the white-hot pain cleans him, and he finds that burning is addictive.  
**Approximate Draft Length: **~800 words  
**Genre: **Angst/General

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**in luce mors**

**_[_**by Madame Rhea Di'Ey**_]_**

**{**_bathe me in fire and let my ashes dance on the wind_**}**

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Dying, Nuada finds, is a terribly tiresome affair.

_Like a star, you explode. The __heat__ leaves you exhausted, but burning bright; dead, and yet reborn. __Tired, and yet so aware. Emotionally, at the very least._

His soul is ripped from his body, and as the now useless carcass that once held him like a lover crystallizes and crumbles – _just like him – _when it hits the floor, he can't help himself a grunt at the searing pain of being torn in two and then ripped into a thousand thousands just to be put back together again. The severing burns, a white-hot dagger of flames cleaving a hundred holes in his soul and leaving behind a feeling of strange cleanness.

In the high of the pain, he remembers the not-quite-myth of the Phoenix bird, and deep down, the child he was at the break of the Dawn smiles. _Perhaps I'll be reborn anew, a bird free of cage that has drunk the waters of Lethe and knows nothing but the blue of the sky and the crisp caress of a cold wind.  
_

Wishful thinking, that.

But fools can dream, and he doesn't think, in all honesty, that he has _–_ _had – _ever been anything if not one.

He looks around him, and sees the fleeting sorrow in Anung Un Rama's eyes before the red man seals the sadness away, burying it beneath a willow in the graveyard he keeps for a heart. On the other side of the hall, Nuala gives the fishman a sad smile before she fades, turning into honey-colored marble beneath the fingertips of the blue amphibian.

"You spoke truly, son of the earth. The world has indeed become poorer, now that you're gone," a feminine voice observes quietly, a thousand echoes wrapped softly around the silken sound.

Everything around him becomes muted; a faded, distant, tasteless thing. The vibrant hum of the world he is no longer a part of is still vivid in his mind's eye, though, and it leaves him aching, longing for the rain on his skin and for the grass beneath the soles of his feet – but it doesn't matter. _Dead men cannot hold hope, or will, or yearning. There is life where there is heart, and I have lost them both._

[_Liar, _an angry voice seethes somewhere in a dark corner of his soul, the voice of reason he'd always droned out; the part of him that always wept. It still does, he notes, and the grief cuts his sternum like polished steel.]

The elf turns.

Behind him, a small woman dressed in robes of flowing crimson stands with her hands wrought together in an easy hold her. Long hair falls around her frame, way down her waist and past her hips, a scarlet curtain of spun copper that glows like a halo of exquisite fire. Black irises mingle with black sclera in the depths of her almond-shaped eyes, and he finds himself lost in that suspiciously understanding abyss.

"Who are you?" he asks, the words tumbling out of his mouth before he could even realize he'd spoken.

The woman smiles with a closed mouth, a certain sadness woven in the creases of the otherwise perfect slash of red lipstick that adorned the lower half of her face. "Your Death," she answers, and black wings spring up from her back, a burgundy edge shining somewhere in the depths of the thick plumage. "Come with me, child," she voices, and holds out a hand, palm up and open.

He takes a tentative step towards her, and the hesitance of the movement makes him angry with himself.

He doesn't want to go. Not yet – not ever. At the end of it all, his life had been the one thing he truly had. And now it had been taken away from him, much like everything else; plucked from his grasp and thrown away in the mud.

[he tries not to think that Nuala had been the one reap it; that's the one betrayal whose burn he'll never be able to forget, even if he has already forgiven it. even if they simmer him on low heat in the dark recesses of the Underworld, the fire that will eat him won't ever be enough to soothe the sting her dagger had left behind. _Oh, sister. What hast thou done?_]

"Where to?" he asks again, and feels the insane desire to laugh. _I've always had nothing but questions that hang on tight nooses and go putrid while waiting for an answer that might; – won't ever come. _Nevertheless, he slides his hand in hers, and welcomes the heat that flows in him with the contact.

It's searing, barely bearable, and it leaves him feeling _clean_.

He never knew pain this great can be so satisfying.

The vermillion shade smiles, and like everything else that came after he died, he feels the radiance burning him. "Infinity," she says, and pulls him closer into an embrace, enveloping him with her arms and with her wings. It's all white-hot fire on his ivory skin, and had he had a body, he would've been reduced to gray nothingness since second one.

As it is, Nuada burns, and welcomes the sear. Maybe, just maybe, if he'll burn long enough, he'll turn to ash.

_And maybe then the gods will give me wings and let me drown in the sky._

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**A/N: **feel free to review, add to your favorites, share with your friends and whatnot. also, **of the aforementioned, I own everything but Nuada, Nuala, and Hellboy. **in layman's terms, nobody paid me a single penny for this. sadness.


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